


Oils

by scioscribe



Category: Rose Madder - Stephen King
Genre: Gen, Magic, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-30
Updated: 2018-10-30
Packaged: 2019-08-11 01:01:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16465697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Rosie becomes a bit of a collector.





	Oils

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Edonohana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/gifts).



Bill called the little nook just off the dining room Rosie’s gallery.

It was a narrow, windowless space.  They’d had to rig up ceiling lamps to cut through the shadows.

“What the hell was the original purpose of this, anyway?” Bill had said when they’d first moved in.  He’d rapped his fist against the walls of it like he would unearth a secret passageway.  “Servant’s quarters for people who didn’t like their servants?”

“Maybe it’s to ‘Cask of Amontillado’ your enemies,” Rosie suggested.  She’d been recording a Poe compilation and the ornate, highly sensitized horror had crept into her mind and blossomed out, a black flower endlessly blooming; she’d meant the crack as a joke but it hadn’t quite sounded like one.  ( _I repay_.)  She had tugged Bill further into the house and distracted him with the nursery and her plans for the wallpaper border.  Moons and stars.

“And roses,” Bill had said, “for her mother.”

She had taken him to bed then.  Or, at any rate, to window-seat.

But it really was the Amontillado room that transfixed her, not the nursery or the sweet little sewing room.  She knew almost from the start that it had requirements of her—not, she hoped, strenuous ones.  She knew firsthand how badly you could lose arguing with magic.  When she sat at night with Pammy and read to her about what happened when you gave a mouse a cookie, she felt uneasy about it all.

That didn’t stop her, though.

So she built up a collection, canvas by canvas.  She pulled the paintings out of garage sales, thrift stores, and pawn shops, for the most part, though once she’d veered off into a ritzy neighborhood full of townhouses and sat through half an estate auction to get a particularly unlovely original the size of a postcard.  It was so thickly and goopily covered with black paint that she could only just make out threads of rose madder and dove gray underneath it.  The money she’d had to spend on that one—it had meant one of her rare screaming matches with Bill.  They had, at least, made up in a fine fashion.

He had stuck a Post-It note underneath it the next time she looked in on the gallery: _Bill’s Folly_ , it said, and she had felt love seize her chest like a cramp.

She bought oil paintings that looked like the stripped covers of Barbara Michaels novels.  She wrote into magazines and had commissions done and mailed to her—sometimes those came steep, too.  Someone named Michael Whelan painted a rose for her; a Berni Wrightson did her a pen-and-ink wolf, some rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.  That last one scared Pammy so much that Rosie cut out a square of velvet and tacked it over the picture like a curtain.

 _You have to teach your daughter how to keep away from the wolves_ , Rose Madder said to her in a dream.  Her approval was as sweet and heavy as cream.  Just as cold, too: any warmth would make it curdle.  _And to fight them, if need be.  
_

_You’re half-wolf yourself,_ Rosie said.

_So are you.  So too will Pamela be someday._

_Why do I need these?_ Rosie said.  She could feel morning pressing in upon her.  If she didn’t wake, would she be walled up alive in the dream, Fortunato screaming for rescue?  _Why collect them?_

 _You put up the rose wallpaper because sometimes a woman needs a garden_ , Rose Madder said.  _You buy the paintings because sometimes she needs a door.  Something to blow open and shut with the wind.  You can say you don’t like that, but you do._

She did.  She had been afraid of the world once, but not anymore.  Now she didn’t hide from even the strangest parts of it—she enclosed them, wild pictures in tame settings.  (Funny how both paintings and doors had frames.)  There was no trap here, no walling up alive, just choices.  And that was what she wanted to leave her daughter—that was what she wanted to have for herself.  A good, beautiful home… and a thousand ways to leave it, a thousand places to go. 

She dragged a chair over from the kitchen table and wrote ROSIE’S GALLERY on the lintel above the little nook.  Bill would get a kick out of it.

And on the underside of a loose tile in the kitchen, she wrote ROSIE’S HOME.  An anchor, in case she ever forgot.

A place for everything and everything in its place.


End file.
